"Just Before Obsession"

A Story by Ariadne Grey

Deep into the forest, where you cannot see, is something that watches you while you flee.

The aroma of petrichor clung to her flesh, rubber soles squishing into the wet forest bog, leaving shallow footprints that the deluge washed away.

Droplets sluiced over her catching onto the dark arc of her lashes, filling between the partition of her lips, soaking through her clothes. But the cold could not permeate her laughter that reverberated through the deep, dark, dank forest with giddy, girlish glee.

Eyes from the forest followed her slipping form but they were not the eyes of its creatures, wisely hiding in their burrows and trees, but the attention of a stranger not of the forest, nor of the town.

Perhaps not even of this world.

Moist holes filigreed on its hefty, hulking bulge of a body pursed and puckered, as if savoring the mist of the wind.

Adrenaline flavored the aroma of petrichor but he could not taste fear in her scent. Rather, exhilaration.

She was running not because she sensed a pursuer but because she sought adventure. She seek to explore. She was searching for answers.

That it has observed in the weeks it has watched her.

At first, xe thought she was fleeing and found her foolish if not pathetic, but her curiosity held a certain... charm, her audacity quite amusing, and xe loathed that he may like the little human so blissfully oblivious of xis preternatural presence.

The insolent, insignificant ingrate ran through the mud, xis appendages racing beneath the bushes, camouflaged as bramble roots, slithering in the mortal's wake like deformed vines.

Xe flicked a stone out of her path, convincing itself it was not out of affection.

She crouched near the forest edge, knees in the muck, and xe extended a lithe limb to curl around a loose strand.

Tugging, grasping, dragging a piece of her back into the woods.

It will have to do, for now.

Next time.

- Ariadne Grey